Bandcamp-The Sheikha Tracks Remastered
Born in Marrakech, Sapho left Morocco at the age of 17 and moved with her parents to Paris, where after studying at university, she first worked as an actress and entered the “petit Conservatoire de Mireille”. Her Début-album Le Balayeur du Rex was released in 1977. One year later she went to New York as a correspondent for the trendy magazine “Actuel”; and finally stayed there for one year to perform with different musicians of the local New Wave - No Wave scene. In 1980 she recorded with American musicians the album Janis in London, which is considered her most violent album of all. Seven other albums followed in the eighties and early nineties, coloured more and more by Arabic influences. An Oum Kalsoum version of El Atlal in 1994, a very courageous and quite risky venture, was well received in Arabic countries as well as in Europe and Japan. She released ten more albums since.
Introduced by some Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects members in 1996, we met in Paris and decided to work together on a new project, focusing on the Sheikha scene of Marrakech. The vocal basics and main ideas were recorded in Casablanca, during three hectic days. Additional recordings, were realised a few months later between Switzerland and Bill Laswell’s Green Point Studios in Brooklyn-NY, where Bill Laswell also produced two songs.
Zahera and her girls from Hallilifa, one of the most popular and famous Sheikha combos of Marrakech at that time, were singing and jamming along with Sapho on six tracks, as if she (Sapho) had been a member of the bunch for ages. But what exactly is a Sheikha? In Morocco or Algeria, it‘s a kind of “woman of ill-repute” or outcast who sings at weddings and feasts, with heavy make- up, gold teeth, who drinks a lot and smokes dope. They shake their hair to the beat, move their sensual bellies to please women and men; sing about love and other realistic themes from the daily life. At feasts, they are well accepted and admired for their freedom and independence acquired in an Islamic country; in their private lives however they seem to suffer a certain disgrace from society‘s attitude to them, which forces them to live often together and hidden, rejected by their families and relatives.
With originally 13 tracks released in 1997, this remastered 2023 collection, comes with seven songs, from which a few will also be heard in some upcoming film soundtrack !
